They are at the Gates of Vienna and they are at the Brandenburg Gate in Germany demanding they be allowed to stay. Some, as this gushy piece in the International Herald Tribune (appropriately titled: Barbarians at the Gate) tells us, are “asylum shoppers” meaning they have been turned down for refugee status in another western country and now are camping on public streets in Germany demanding stuff.
Here is writer Lucian Kim making sure the reader hears the warm and fuzzy side of the nice folks just yearning for a better life! And, it’s all about how Germans don’t like outsiders, don’t you know! (emphasis below is mine)
BERLIN — There’s a refugee camp in the center of the German capital filled with people who have fled conflicts around the world. They sleep in tents and eat donated food. Almost all of them are breaking German law just by being here.
For more than four months, about 50 asylum seekers and their supporters have been braving the elements on a square in Berlin’s bohemian Kreuzberg neighborhood. The Occupy-style camp appeared in October after a group of refugees marched from Bavaria to Berlin to protest Germany’s restrictive asylum law. Some even held a hunger strike at the Brandenburg Gate.
Their main demand: the abolition of the so-called “Residenzpflicht,” or residence requirement, which limits asylum seekers’ freedom of movement while their applications are pending. Critics contend [pdf] that Germany is the only country in the European Union with such a restriction, and that the regulation’s real purpose is to isolate and intimidate refugees.
When I visited the camp on Monday, laundry hung over unmade beds and worn couches inside one of the tents. Two gas heaters gasped against the cold seeping up through the pallets that raised the floor from the ground. A photographer’s lamp provided the only light.
This is where Waleed Mohamed Adam lives. The soft-spoken 28-year-old said he had fled his home in Darfur in 2007, reaching Europe via Libya. He has lost all contact with his family.
And he has no documents. As Adam put it, “My fingerprints are in the Netherlands.” Because his asylum application there was denied, he can’t get a second hearing in Germany and faces deportation. [The EU doesn’t allow “shopping” for another country if you’ve been previously denied, so you can bet there is much more to Adam’s story—ed]
Gee, could that be “soft spoken” Waleed Mohamed Adam with his fist raised in that photo from October?
The squatters were given the equivalent of $300 a month to live on, but demanded and got $500 from that foreigner-hating German government!
Kim continues:
Without any legal status, the refugees aren’t treated much better than criminals. They find themselves in a trap: Dependent on meager state handouts because they are restricted from working or studying, they are under constant suspicion of milking the social welfare system.
This contemptuous treatment was confirmed by Germany’s Constitutional Court in July, when it ruled that the $300 monthly allowance for refugees — which hadn’t been adjusted in 19 years — must be raised to the minimum social benefits granted to Germans, about $500.
[…..]
Germany’s harsh asylum law reveals its lingering discomfort with “ausländer,” or foreigners — even as an aging, shrinking indigenous population is projected to lose its standard of living unless it welcomes immigrants. [Does Kim actually believe that opening a western country to mass immigration—to colonizers—from the third world will improve the living standards of westerners!—ed]
Kim tells us there is one woman in the camp and she speaks fluent English. I suspect she is the Commie agitator in this group. This is about flooding the West with needy third-worlders to bring instability and chaos and to ultimately bring down capitalism. They have advanced pretty far don’t you think!
….. The only woman in the camp, Napuli Paul Langa is a born leader. Although she had to break off her schooling in her native South Sudan, she speaks fluent English. She said she had to flee because of her human rights activism. [If she really cared about human rights she would stay and fight for her own country! How can anyone fall for this propaganda!—ed]
She didn’t expect to have to carry on that struggle in Germany. In November, Langa was one of the refugees’ delegates at a meeting with members of Parliament that turned out to be fruitless.
“This is the fighting place, the political place,” she said of the camp. “We’re staying here. We’re going to protest in the streets until they meet our demands.”
Kim has more, read it all.
They are squatting and demanding all over Europe, here in the Netherlands and then there is poor Greece. You can bet this is all a coordinated strategy.